Bourdainification

Bourdain’s overbearing influence on food writing inscribed all the marks of the ‘real’ into the show as much as any set designer or method actor.

Image Credit: Huw Bradshaw

If our hand was forced to name a certain sultan of culinary cool for the last 20 years, almost indisputably, we would crown one Tony Bourdain.

With that, it’s completely unsurprising that we have now found another tall, handsome, vaguely European celebrity chef we attach ourselves to: he only happens to be fictional. The dark, brooding, nic-addled masculinity of The Bear’s Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) is one that has us in a collective chokehold. 

From watching even one episode of the show, there’s no doubt that Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s iconic 2000 memoir, was used as a handbook to every part of production, from the “dope-dealing busboy” to the shows Chicagoan rendition of Bourdain’s “New York punk classics on tape”, displayed in a soundtrack which aptly captures the music scene of a city home to Earth, Wind & Fire and Rise Against, Wilco and Common.

Bourdain’s overbearing influence on food writing inscribed all the marks of the ‘real’ into the show as much as any set designer or method actor. More so than what any one person has seen, smelled, or heard, the words printed inside a copy of Kitchen Confidential have impacted the ‘real’ of a commercial kitchen. 

Naturally, no piece written about The Bear fails to point out its realism. Where they fail is recognising how the show doesn’t merely absorb this influence, but thoroughly questions the men who have constituted and perpetuated this ‘realism’.

The Bear is the boiling point of Bourdainification: it is its height, but also its critique. 

Carmen embodies Bourdainification. He swears, he yells, he smokes, and most importantly he is riddled with dread, anxiety, and darkness. There isn’t a moment in the show where his head doesn’t look like it could explode. Bourdainification doesn’t only normalise this type of personality, it glamorises it. According to its own principles, the kitchen is a dirty place, a cruel place, a chaotic place: the cook must embody this environment to master it. This view is also a favourite of managers and owners who love to regard the struggles of an understaffed and mismanaged kitchen as simply ‘real hospitality’.

Bourdain’s philosophy of food and writing can be seen as strictly realist. The first lines of his New Yorker essay that launched him to commercial success regard eating as about “cruelty and decay”. But what we understand of ‘realism’ across film, art, and politics, applies the same for Bourdain: the ‘realist’ and the ‘real’ are not equivalent. 

A slew of articles have already come out praising The Bear for all the carefully constructed signifiers of ‘real’ food industry writing they have been taught to recognise, raving madly about burn marks and “behinds”. GoodFood and The Guardian have both brought in industry veterans to talk about how realistic the show is, and an unsurprisingly trite New York Post article has declared a ‘hot-line-cook-summer’ based on the show’s appeal. Such reviews gleefully indulge in the show’s realism while missing everything it actually has to criticise about it.

While the character of Carmen reflects Bourdain’s philosophy, he is far from inscrutable in the context of the show. His uncompromising view of the world — and the kitchen — as a dark, uncaring place in which no failure can be accepted and all odds must be endured, is the cause of constant breakdown. It’s established early that there seems to be no pragmatic, economic explanation for Carmen’s interest in keeping the failing restaurant afloat, rather, it is a means of honouring his late brother’s memory. As we delve deeper into Carmen’s psyche, it becomes increasingly obvious that his determination to save the restaurant is closer to penance than tribute, a symbolic burden he bears in the wake of his brother’s suicide. At no point does the show portray this quest to keep an authentic family business alive in an increasingly gentrified city as anything but noble, but it questions whether Carmen’s processing of grief is healthy or productive. 

It might seem as if I’m selling Bourdain as some neoliberal private-managerial-class-boot-licker, but really, I think he was just too nihilistic to present the conditions of his society as anything more than perpetually worsening: a fair view in any case. Among questionable biopics, tiresome tributes, and endless SBS reruns of No Reservations, the one thing nobody will dare say about Bourdain is that he was wrong.

At some point you realise that this show — this incarnation of everything Bourdain wrote and spoke about the food industry — isn’t a Rocky-esque story of rise and victory, but one of crash and burn. Just when you expect to see the pain Carmen willfully endures finally pay off, you are left with nothing. 

This interest in facing the ‘gritty, uncompromising reality’ of our world — often unprepared and always alone —  defines everything wrong with the masculinity Bourdain embodied.

The Bear tries to grapple with this: quietly at first, then rising into a thunderous crescendo of thought and feeling.